Helen Macdonald (writer)

"Falcons are the fastest animals that have ever lived. They excite us, seem superior to other birds and exude a dangerous, edgy, natural sublimity. All of this means nothing to falcons, of course; these are our own concepts. Though real, living animals, falcons can't be seen except through what anthropologist described as your Kulturbrille, the invisible lens your own culture gives you through which you see the world."

"People say, Why didn’t you get a dog? I guess the big question is, Why didn’t you find a human? In a way, I tried. I fell in love with a friend of mine, a very nice man. I think I freaked him out, deeply, because I was broken. He ran away. So maybe there was a feeling that the hawk was safe. But is very strange in that it’s very much about letting things go. These birds are flown free; once you’ve got them tame and trained, you let them go every day! And hope they come back to you. When they do, that reestablishes the sense that things can return."

"As the slipped towards spring and cases of began to blossom horribly across the map of Europe, I was in Costa Rica on a wildlife-watching tour. For two weeks I shared a minibus with a group of retired British folk whose main aim was to see as many birds as possible: we met every evening to tick off the species we’d seen that day from a ready-printed list. We saw s, s, s, s, hawks, a whole cavalcade of tiny , s that snapped and buzzed through the air like animated electrons. ... ... I realised that this trip was disquieting me because we weren’t learning anything much about the birds we saw: we were identifying them, ticking them off a list, and moving on, caught up in a hungry and expectant apperception of the world in which the lived reality of the creatures that flew and sang around us seemed almost entirely obscured by the triumphant, costly light of seeing them."

"s are various creatures and we’ve recruited them to symbolise many things. s are a placeholder for social anxieties: reviled as invading thugs in the , their crime seems little more than failing to treat humans and human spaces with due respect. Other seabirds, like s and s, fall into the anthropomorphised category of cute little guys, mable avian '. And oceanic specialists like s and s spend so much of their lives at sea, visiting their nesting burrows in darkness, they seem barely part of our world at all: the Other rendered in feathers. But in my lifetime, seabirds have symbolised one thing above all: . News photographs of s thickly coated in horrified me when I was young; their gluey silhouettes are still seared into my brain."

"s nest in obscure places, in dark and cramped spaces: hollows beneath roof tiles, behind the intakes for ventilation shafts, in the towers of churches. To reach them, they fly straight at the entrance holes and enter seemingly at full tilt. Their nests are made of things snatched from the air: strands of dried grass pulled aloft by s; molted pigeon-breast feathers; flower petals, leaves, scraps of paper, even butterflies. During World War II, swifts in Denmark and Italy grabbed , reflective scraps of tinfoil dropped from aircraft to confuse enemy radar, flashing and twirling as it fell. They mate on the wing. And while young martins and s return to their nests after their first flights, young swifts do not. As soon as they tip themselves free of the nest hole, they start flying, and they will not stop flying for two or three years, bathing in rain, feeding on airborne insects, winnowing fast and low to scoop fat mouthfuls of water from lakes and rivers."

"We are pretty much in the right now, we just expect it to take place in 24 hours. Actually, it just takes place in a slightly longer timeframe. It is going to be grim. We are going to have to adapt."

"It’s true, you can go nuts when you suddenly lose someone you love, you fall off the world. I saw in the goshawk — this ferocious, intense, bloodthirsty, murderous creature — what I felt: rage-filled and angry, living in the present with no thought for the future. My mistake was identifying too much with the bird and forgetting how to be a human."

"Macdonald is making it her mission to communicate as exactly as possible what s and a host of other species are, in the hope that her words are not obituaries."

"' ... tells the story of how one woman deals with grief by training a . This isn't as strange as it sounds: Macdonald, who became obsessed with as a child, has flown many falcons over the years, and it's who has died so suddenly, a man she associates strongly with her passion (a press photographer, he and his daughter were good companions, sharing a certain beadiness and the ability to be vastly patient). But in another way it's perverse. Goshawks are by reputation the ruffians of , being bloodthirsty, temperamental and supposedly difficult to tame."